The Konami Code for Internet Marketing

Guest Post
By Dealer Dan

The Konami Code

My name is Dealer Dan. I’ve been an internet affiliate marketer since 1997, primarily focusing on the gambling field. Unfortunately over the years due largely to the US government, online gambling isn’t as lucrative as it once was. Therefore, I’ve been attempting to diversify outside the gambling niche.

Going into areas that I am not knowledgeable about would usually be hard to impossible. Unless you have a cheat code, or a game genie or gameshark to assist you. And that’s what I’ve got.

It’s called ClickTale.

Okay – so using ClickTale isn’t exactly cheating…but man, it sure feels like it at times. I only discovered ClickTale in 2007. I think back to the 10 years of internet marketing I did before that, and I wonder how I ever managed to run an affiliate website without it.

This article should give you some insight of just one example of how beneficial ClickTale can be, and what it can be used for.

Background

One of the websites that I launched late last year was DIY Landlord Forms. The premise of a website like this is simple: landlords create forms such as rental agreements. They fill in some fields like the property address, if the property has parking, payment options and rent amount etc – and then for $20 they are able to purchase a completed rental agreement form that they are able to print off and use as an official contract between them and the tenant.

Considering the same sort of form at a lawyers office could cost in excess of $200, this is obviously a big business. And a very competitive one as well. It’s not the sort of website you can throw up overnight and immediately start ranking high in Google for.

With so much competition for a new website, you rely solely on Google Adwords for traffic.

When it comes to getting traffic from Google Adwords the rules are fairly simple: earn more than you spend.

Now I’d say that approximately 1 in 20 clicks must purchase the form for us to break-even. We actually got off to a positive start, with 1 in 14 clicks on average purchasing the form.

But that still wasn’t good enough.

That means that 13 people who were visiting the website on our targeted keywords were not purchasing the form. And it was my job to find out why.

You look at the RAW data and what do you see? 14 people come to the website from all over the USA. 1 purchases. 13 don’t. Even worse, the majority of the visitors that are not purchasing leave the site after just 10 seconds.

What could be turning them off? Is there a browser issue? Do they not like the design of the website? Are we missing something that they require?

We tried various techniques. We added testimonials. We put more focus on testimonials. We removed testimonials! We made the header area smaller. We made it bigger. We changed logos. We tried a different colour scheme. We added live support. We sent a message to every new visitor.

Nothing seemed to work. We even removed EVERYTHING from the landing page except the form that they needed to fill in. So the landing page looked like this:

That’s when I decided to unleash my secret weapon: ClickTale.

Unleashing ClickTale

There are many options for you when it comes to using ClickTale. However your ultimate aim should be to have an end goal. People install Clicktale on their websites without really knowing what they are looking for. They just think “Cool, I can watch my visitors” but don’t take it any further than that.

Whenever you use ClickTale, you need to sit back and ask what goals you are trying to achieve with it. You may have added a new element to your website below the fold, and want to see how visible it is to your average visitor. Or you may be running split tests on a landing page, and want to see what attracts your visitor, what text they take the time to read and what text they skim through or skip altogether etc.

My end goal was simple: to determine why the 10 seconds or less visitors were leaving.

Analysis Process

So I pulled up 50 videos for that target group and I went through them one by one, making notes of what each visitor did. When you do that, you tend to notice a trend. The trend I noticed was a very simple one: 40 out of the 50 videos saw the visitor land on the homepage, scroll to the bottom and then leave the site.

Once I had this trend, I went back to all of the video archives to see if this differed depending on any of the design changes that we implemented. Again, I noticed the very same trend – many visitors were scrolling down to the bottom of the site, and then leaving.

Now you may think it was overkill to watch so many videos – but one thing you can never do is jump to conclusions. You need to sit down and analyze as much data as you can. Thankfully, ClickTale makes this extremely easy to do.

Using this video data, I was able to determine that the visitors were turned off by the length of the form. I watched them hit “page down” 4-5 different times until they got to the end of the form, and then they left. Matching that up with the keywords, it was easy to see that they were overwhelmed by the length of the form.

So we changed it up. When we started the site, we wanted to make it as user-friendly as possible. We had a “help” section explaining everything that the user would fill in. We had lots of space. It looked pretty!

But thanks to ClickTale, we knew it wasn’t what the user wanted. So we changed the form. Check it out here below.

Web Form Redesign

We reduced the size of the form by over 80%, going with a checklist style. Look at the forms side by side:

Both of those screenshots were taken based on what my resolution could see when I landed on the form. As you can see, there is a huge difference in what you can see in the old layout compared to the new layout:

All it took was about 20 minutes of work changing the CSS and layout slightly.

For our target keywords, our sales went up from 1 in 14 sales to 1 in 7 sales almost immediately.

And it was all thanks to ClickTale.

ClickTale is by far one of the most valuable internet marketing tools a webmaster can have. You just have to understand how to use it, and always make sure that when you are watching videos, you have some sort of purpose to it.

Now if you don’t mind, I have to brew a pot of tea and see what I can do to get those 6 other visitors to convert…

About the Author

Dealer Dan has been an affiliate marketer since 1997, and runs his own Affiliate Guide website. Just remember if you visit – he’ll be watching you.